Cancer pain ranks high as an unsolved problem attending serious forms of this disease. Present methods of treating the symptom require frequent dosing with short-lived narcotic drugs. The fear of abuse and addiction causes those who administer to the patients to be too conservative in prescribing and administering narcotic analgesics. There are wide swings in the pharmacodynamics of narcotic drugs over each dosing interval. Many problems such as these which attend the use of narcotics in chronic pain can be resolved by improvements in means of drug administration and delivery. It is specifically proposed to evaluate potent members of the narcotic class of drugs for their suitability for transdermal delivery. Permeabilities through human epidermal membranes are to be assessed and solubilities are to be characterized. Simple prototype drug delivery patches containing the narcotics in gel and polymer matrices will be made and tested. These collective initiatives will allow assessment of how much of a given drug can be delivered through skin. It is also planned to assess whether the narcotics are harmful to cells in concentrations reached locally transdermally. The ability of the skin to inactivate the drugs as they diffusively pass through is also to be measured. Together this generated data will tell how physicochemically and biologically (up to a point) feasible the transdermal method of delivery is for each of the five narcotics to be carefully evaluated.